Cheese and Red Onion Pizza; Olive Paste Pizza; and China Beach

     I broke with tradition a little bit this week.  I usually pick the next pizza in whatever two recipe books we are working on, and this week would have been two eggplant pizzas.  First of all, I didn't want to have two relatively similar pizzas on the same day - that's why I work out of three books instead of one (most recipe books tend to group similar recipes together).  Also, Jeff was still a little shell-shocked from the last eggplant pizza we had the previous week.  Not that he didn't like it.  He hated to admit it, but he really did like it, but I  knew he would complain if we had it two weeks in a row.  I moved on to the next pizza in each book.  I will revisit the eggplant when I have an overabundance in the summer.

     On Wednesday, I started with the crusts.  Both pizzas called for a basic crust, and each recipe had its own version.  I decided to make the two different versions to see which I liked better.  It turned out to be a tough comparison in the end, because the one crust was rolled out very thin, and the other one was thicker with a nice lip around the edge.

OLIVE PASTE PIZZA

Adapted from James McNair's Vegetarian Pizza

Crust:

1 cup warm water

2 teaspoons active dry yeast

1 tablespoon sugar

3¼ cups bread flour

1 teaspoon salt

¼ cup olive oil

Olive Paste:

6 cloves of garlic

½ cup (packed) basil leaves

1 cup kalamata olives

2 tablespoons lemon juice

½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

The Rest of the Story:

4 ounces Port Salut cheese

5 ounces Taleggio cheese

2½ ounces sliced red onion (separated into half-rings)

1 large tomato (about 9 ounces), diced

3 tablespoons shredded basil

Make the crust: Combine the yeast and water in a bowl and set aside for at least five minutes.  Stir the flour and salt together in the bowl of a mixer fitted with a dough hook.  Add the yeast mixture and the ¼ cup of olive oil and stir on a low speed until the mixture forms a ball around the hook.  Continue mixing a little longer  until the dough becomes smooth and elastic.  Let rest for an hour in a bowl in a warm, dry place.

Make the olive paste: Combine the garlic, ½ cup of basil leaves, olives, lemon juice, and black pepper in the container of a blender or food processor.  Puree until smooth and well-combined.

Assemble the pizza:  Preheat the oven to 500º F.  Divide the dough into 11 or 12 pieces.  Roll or stretch each piece into a 3½ inch circle.  Pinch up the edges to form a small lip around the entire circle.  Divide the olive sauce evenly between the dough circles.  Spread the sauce to the lip of each circle.  Crumble the cheeses and toss together to combine.  Distribute the crumbles over each of the mini pizzas.  Top with the sliced onion and diced tomato.  Bake in the preheated oven for about 15 minutes or until the crusts are golden brown, and the cheese has melted.  Remove from the oven and garnish with the shredded basil.

     My next task was to make the "olive paste".  Boy, I could think of much more appetizing words to call this - tapenade  olive sauce, olive puree - but "paste"??  The recipe for this paste was a little vague.  It called for ripe olives.  There are all kinds of varieties of olives that fall under the category of "ripe olives."  I guess I liked the open options, but it would have been nice to know which one was intended.  I suppose it comes back to the whole thing about making decisions.  I decided to go with kalamatas, because we went to Costco, and the options there were kalamata or regular black olives or an insanely expensive variety pack.  Regular olives seemed a little mundane for the basis of a pizza, and I was too cheap to get the insanely expensive ones.  I think that kalamatas are juicier and have a little more zip than regular black olives.  The texture is a little bit softer, too, but that doesn't really matter if you're going to make them into a "paste" anyway.
     It did seem like a shame to grind all the ingredients up together.  The purple kalamatas with the white cloves of garlic and the bright green basil leaves were beautiful together in my Vita Mix before I pushed the button.  Afterward, it was a dull grayish brown - taupe, maybe.  It tasted fantastic, though.  I may have overdone the garlic a tad (is that possible??), because the little taste I had off of the tip of my finger almost numbed my tongue.

      Also on Wednesday, I sliced the onions for both pizzas and readied the cheese.  The original recipe for the olive pizza called for Morbier, Port Salut, or Taleggio cheese.   I went to Byerly's on my lunch hour to look for one of these three options.  Unfortunately, I couldn't remember what the two of the options were when I had gotten to Byerly's.  I remembered Port Salut, because it is a favorite of mine.  I did remember that one of the other two options was a cheese that started with a "t" and had at least one "g" in it and sounded more like a pasta than a cheese.  I couldn't remember how much to get either, and I didn't have very much money on me, so I was hoping a little would do it.  I asked for the Port Salut, and the cheese expert there was just about to cut a wheel of it up for their case.  I told her I just wanted a little bit, and she handed me a little wedge that was a little over a quarter of a pound. While I was waiting for her to cut that wedge, I looked at all of the interesting varieties of cheeses they had in their case.  I found a little cube of Taleggio (about a quarter of a pound, too) and grabbed that also.

     When I had gotten home Wednesday night and was reading through the recipe, it said that the cheese should be shredded.  It made me wonder if the author had actually tested out these recipes as they were written.  I'm not sure what Morbier cheese is like, but Taleggio and Port Salut are really soft cheeses.  To shred them would be like trying to shred a block of cream cheese.  I thought maybe I could dice it up into little cubes, but that was nearly impossible too. I cut it up the best I could, put it in a bowl covered with plastic wrap, and put in the refrigerator for Thursday.  When I took it out of the refrigerator on Thursday, the cheese had reformed itself back into one big blob. So much for trying to save some time.
     I had another objection with this recipe, when I started working on it again on Thursday.  I again started with the dough.  The directions said to make the dough and roll it out and shape it as directed in the dough recipe.  The dough recipe itself said to either cut the dough in half and shape it into two ten inch pizzas, cut the dough into four pieces and fold them over to form calzone, etc.  Was this supposed to be a little appetizer pizza or a large pizza or what?  The picture showed little pizzas, or at least they seemed to be, so that was what I went with.  I wasn't sure how many it would make or how large the dough balls should be.  I just guessed and weighed my first one - 1.9 ounces.  Then, I made sure each subsequent dough ball was 1.9 ounces (can you say "OCD"?).  I got 11 of these.  It wasn't a nice, even number, but I wasn't sure how many people were coming anyway.  If it was the full seven I was thinking, we could each have one and a half and fight over the last half.  If it was six of us, each adult could have two, and Gracie (who was trying not to eat gluten anyway) could just have one.
     I rolled each little ball out into a 3½ inch circle.  I pinched all the around the edges to make a lip.  Looking at my olive "paste", which more resembled a glue in thickness, might just run out all over my baking sheet if there wasn't some sort of barrier.  Even with this small barrier, it may still run out all over the tray.  I was pretty proud of how uniform they all were and how circular I was able to get them - this is not an easy feat for me.

CHEESE AND RED ONION PIZZA

Adapted from All the Best Pizzas by Joie Warner

½ cup warm water

1¼ teaspoon active dry yeast

¼ teaspoon sugar

1½ cups bread flour

¼ teaspoon salt

1 ounce aged Gouda cheese

1½ ounces Gruyere cheese

1 ounce sliced red onion, separated into rings

3 tablespoons olive oil, divided

4 tablespoons cornmeal

1 tablespoon fresh basil, shredded

salt and pepper to taste

Combine the yeast and water in a bowl and set aside for at least five minutes.  Stir the flour and salt together in the bowl of a mixer fitted with a dough hook.  Add the yeast mixture and stir on a low speed until the mixture forms a ball around the hook.  Continue mixing a little longer  until the dough becomes smooth and elastic.  Let rest for an hour in a bowl in a warm, dry place. 

Preheat the oven to 500º F with a pizza stone inside, if using.  Dust a pizza peel or board with the cornmeal (one tablespoon at a time as needed) and roll or stretch the dough out to a 14 inch circle.  Brush the dough with 2 tablespoons of olive oil, making sure to get all the way to the edges.  Combine the cheeses together and sprinkle over the dough.  Arrange the onion rings evenly over the cheese.  Drizzle a tablespoon of olive oil over the cheese and onions.  Sprinkle the basil shreds over everything.  Salt and pepper to taste.  Bake in preheated oven for about fifteen minutes or until crust is golden brown and cheese is melted.

     The other dough was quite a bit stickier and hadn't risen much.  I was only able to roll it out to about 14 inches, and it was pretty thin.  I had a feeling this was going to be a bit more like a cracker than a pizza.  I brushed the circle with olive oil and started sprinkling my cheeses over.  I had taken a little liberty with the cheeses.  The recipe actually called for Parmesan, but I already had aged Gouda and some Gruyere hanging out in my fridge, and I didn't want to buy yet another kind of cheese after my expenditure on the Port Salut and the Taleggio.  I had grated both of my leftover cheeses and tossed them together before sprinkling them on the dough.
     My onion slices were almost paper thin. I wondered if they may crisp up on top of the cheese and drizzled with a little olive oil.  There was barely enough to reach all areas of my stunted pizza dough circle.  The onions were quite pungent, though, and I figured they would still add enough flavor to be worthwhile.  I opted for fresh basil instead of the dried it called for.  It's just prettier, in my opinion.   I am not sure that it greatly affects the flavor either way in the end - sure, I had to put on more basil than I would have if it were dried, because the dried basil has a little bit more concentrated flavor.
     I was ready to "paste" my mini pizzas.  Peering into my Vita Mix container (where I had left the concoction), it didn't seem like much.  I tried pouring it out onto the dough circles.  It was too thick.  I stuck a rubber spatula into the bottom of the container and dragged it out from underneath the blades.  I just haven't gotten the hang of getting all of the goo out from under there.  I ended up with about two tablespoons of sauce for each circle.
     I took my cheeses that had reformed into a ball and pulled off little globs one at a time and placed them strategically over each of the mini pizzas.  I topped this with the red onion pieces and diced tomatoes.

     At this point, Jennifer, Gracie, and Pam had arrived.  I had Jen start in on bar-tending.  We were going to make China Beach martinis.   I thought it would be a fitting drink for the evening.  My sisters, mom, and I are planning a trip to China this fall.  For Pam's birthday (which was Tuesday), I got her a couple of books on China.  One was about how to prepare for the trip and what to expect when you get there.  The other was about things to do and see, complete with maps and photos.

CHINA BEACH

1½ measures vodka

½ measure ginger liqueur

1½ measures cranberry juice

Combine all ingredients in an ice filled shaker.  Shake vigorously.  Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.  Garnish with a sliced of candied ginger on the rim of the glass.

     Wow!  This drink was really ginger-y.  It was zingy on the first taste, and then the cranberry came along and smoothed it all over.  It was tangy and a little sharp and very unique.  The first round was gone before the pizzas came out of the oven, so we reloaded the shaker. For the second round, I cut back a little on the ginger and increased the vodka.  It was even better.  Dangerously so, in fact.
     Jennifer had brought an appetizer platter with gorgeous peppers, asiago jalapeno dip, crackers, and various cheeses.  That also had disappeared before the pizzas came out of the oven.  She also brought a gluten-free pizza to contribute to the meal.  It had sausage and onions and olives on it.  She had made the crust with almond flour and other stuff.  The China Beach befuddled me a little bit, so I cannot remember what else she had put in the crust.

     I tried the red onion pizza first.  It turned out great.  The cheese had become one with the crust and held the onions in place on the surface.  It was crisp and delicious.  The onions were still strong but were mellowed by the cheese and having been toasted on the top of the pizza.  The cheeses gave it an almost nutty flavor, and the basil just kicked it up a notch.

     The olive sauce on the mini pizzas had also mellowed after having been cooked.  It was still very flavorful, so much so, in fact, that I think it overpowered the wonderful flavor of the two cheeses.  The recipe had called for 20 ounces of cheese, which I thought was overkill, especially with such strongly flavored cheeses, but maybe it needed that much cheese to keep up with the olives and garlic.  It was still a delicious pizza.  The crust was soft and pillowy, and I didn't have any leakage on my baking sheet (always a plus).

     Roger and Jonah joined us for birthday cake and presents for Pam.  I made the traditional Freese birthday cake - rum fudge bundt.  This rendition had spiced rum and oversize dark chocolate chips.  It was rich and moist, especially with the frozen vanilla custard Jen brought to go with it, but it really clashed with our drink of the week.

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